Straight Eye for the Queer Offspring

I fully intended to say no more about Ayelet Waldman's Salon column, and deliberately refrained from commenting on her contribution to the "Modern Love" page in the NYT styles section, which spilled the details of her lust-filled adoration of her husband. But when Salon ran her second column yesterday, the Significant Other came to the admission, "I went through my own senior-year-of-college lesbian phase (I went to Wesleyan University; it was a graduation requirement)," and, having been at Wesleyan a year behind Waldman, identified the statement as "bullshit." One might charitably characterize it as an attempt at humorous hyperbole, but the Significant Other assures me that Wesleyan in the late '80s was not the hotbed of experimental sapphism that one hears about at, say, Smith.

All I really have to say on the subject is that if people thought Waldman's first column was going to embarrass the kids later in life, the only consolation after she's revealed that she'd love it if her 7-year-old's declaration that he might be gay was true, but the prospect of a lesbian daughter is unappealing because "the stereotypical gay woman makes me insecure, conscious of my failings as a feminist," is that Salon probably doesn't reach all that many people anyway.